“Please can I become a secretary?!” a female senior associate pleaded with her boss. It’s a line I heard more than once in my time working inside law firms, inevitably uttered by the women who were combining their legal careers with parenting. These women pined for the more regular hours and reduced responsibilities of their co-workers.
And they’re not alone. Yesterday researcher and author Rebecca Huntley wrote about a group of mothers she had met who described working on a checkout in a supermarket as something of an ideal role. These were women who had established careers in the finance sector and elsewhere, but they considered their previous jobs as incompatible with their new responsibilities.
“I want to go to work and then leave. It will be minimum wage for me. So maybe a check-out chick? Five per cent discount on groceries?” was one woman’s response.
What lures highly-educated Australian women to jobs that don’t correspond with their skills or ability? Is it because they truly want an “easier” role or is it because they consider those roles as their only viable option?
A job market that places priority and value on employees unencumbered by responsibilities outside of work certainly promotes the latter. As does a domestic labour market in which women still perform the lion’s share of work.
The relationship between these spheres cannot be discounted or underestimated when considering women’s participation at work. The lawyer, who I mentioned above, pleading with her boss is a relevant case in point. She had two small children and a husband, but her husband’s job was more demanding than hers. She was at the frontline of combining her professional and personal responsibilities and the pressure was such that she wanted to compromise her career. Her husband, by contrast, was free to simply concentrate on pursuing his professional responsibilities. It is easy to see the consequences of that situation; her career is more likely to stall under the pressure while his is more likely to thrive.
It’s a situation that is replicated all over the country – both by design and by accident. Recently I wrote about a father-to-be who had intended on taking extended paternity leave to care for their new baby but he was informed it would be tantamount to ruining his career. That, disappointingly, puts the mother and father on track to fulfil more traditional roles; one as the primary caregiver and one as the primary breadwinner.
The ramifications are twofold. It simply reinforces the status quo and it makes families vulnerable. Rebecca Huntley explains how precarious a one-income family can quickly become. “In a number of cases, the partner’s income was subsequently eroded by business failure, retrenchment or disability. This meant an exit from the middle class for the household. It placed more pressure on the woman’s employment which, part-time and insecure, could not compensate for the loss of the male job. This was sometimes further exacerbated by divorce or separation.”
Aside from the possible problems at an individual level there are broader social and economic consequences of women abandoning their professional ambitions. Australia’s investment in female education is high but we are failing to capture that value.
While it’s tempting to assume women who seek out simpler jobs are “leaning out”, the reality is more complex. If they had an option of meaningful work that utilised their skills and experience that could be performed with genuine flexibility I have no doubt which option they’d take. Until that is a viable option, however, women will opt out and we’ll all miss out.
On the one hand it might seem crazy for an educated woman to give up her career and her earning potential in favour of a minimum-wage job, but on the other hand is it any wonder? The truly crazy thing is that we live in a world where that choice seems rational.
Of course, if we started to value output more than input and started to look beyond full-time work as the primary indicator of a worthwhile contribution at work, it would become far less rational. Wouldn’t that be something?